Eighteen years ago, on this day, March 22nd, 2007, Fairfax Media tells its employees to virtue-signal
From: Staff Notices To: All_Fairfax_Staff
Sent: Thursday, 22 March 2007 9:06 AM
Subject: EARTH HOUR – A MESSAGE TO ALL STAFF
When the lights of Sydney are turned off for one hour at 7:30pm on Saturday, March 31, we should take a moment to reflect, with pride, on the role Fairfax Media has played in Earth Hour.
For the past eight months, the Earth Hour working group has been meeting every Tuesday on Level 19 at Darling Park to plan this bold event.
Every strand of our business – management, editorial, online, commercial, marketing and production – has been involved in the planning process.
(From Ray Evans, 27 April 2007 rant…)
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 384ppm. As of 2025 it is 427ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that approximately six months previously, climate change had burst back into Australian public consciousness, via the Millennium Drought, Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, things like the Stern Review and perhaps even the UK Camp for Climate Action.
Kevin Rudd as first ALP shadow foreign secretary and then leader had by this time, already called climate change “the great moral challenge of our generation” (he was using the issue as a stick with which to beat the incumbent Prime Minister, John Howard). And everyone wants to feel they’re doing their bit without being at all really inconvenienced, or to turn that “inconvenience” into a display of virtue.
What I think we can learn from this is that there might be a so-called Earth Hour, but the other 23 days of that day, and all the other days of the year where there isn’t an Earth Hour is what – Anti Earth Hour? or Kill the Earth Hour? Go figure.
What happened next
Some people switched some lights off. And patted themselves heartily on the back. We’ll come back to this on the day itself, March 31.
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.
Also on this day:
March 22, 1960 – US Television warning of carbon dioxide build up, courtesy Athelstan Spilhaus…